AUSTIN — It wasn’t quite fear, Mike Perrin recalled, “but it bordered on that.” He just hoped no one noticed.

Earlier during that summer of 1965, in the rural town of Cameron, Perrin graduated from high school with 86 classmates. Once he made the hour-and-a-half drive to the University of Texas, where he’d always dreamed of playing football, he found more people than that waiting to try out for the freshman team.

Perrin played fullback. So did seven other guys. The competition was intense, but so was his sense of wonder.

“That never really went away,” Perrin said. “It was, ‘Wow, this is a big world.’ It was eye-opening to see what a big place this was.”

Fifty years later, UT opened his eyes again. And now, just as before, the Longhorns’ new interim athletic director can admit he wasn’t sure exactly what he was getting into before he arrived.

It turns out impressing Darrell Royal might have been the easy part.

Perrin, who played four seasons for the legendary UT coach before embarking on a career as a successful Houston trial lawyer, has held his job as the leader of one of college sports’ highest-profile athletic program for six weeks.

At the urging of school president Greg Fenves and several prominent friends associated with the school, Perrin agreed to sign on as athletic director for a year. That doesn’t give him much time to adjust and settle in.

“It is a far more complex job than I thought it might be,” Perrin said. “A lot of it would overwhelm me if I were 35, seeing it for the first time. At my age, it’s not overwhelming.”

One of the main reasons UT chose Perrin to replace Steve Patterson was because officials believed him to be the kind of fence-mender capable of repairing relationships — with fans, with alumni, with staffers and with coaches. Thus far, Perrin has lived up to all expectations in that role.

But the Longhorns also needed a strong leader willing to take charge of a department prone to dysfunction and infighting in recent years. Although Patterson became the public face of that discord, sources said, he wasn’t the sole cause of it.

“Some people assume just because Steve Patterson is gone, everything will work itself out,” one high-ranking member of the athletic department said. “It’s not that simple.”

During the past 24 months, UT has changed athletic directors twice. It’s added a new football coach, men’s basketball coach, university president, chief revenue officer, communications director and head of the Longhorn Foundation. It’s also been subject to an internal investigation into its academic affairs office.

Are all of those entities aligned? Perrin said he’s asking a lot of questions in that vein. And while he said he’s been given no reason to believe there’s “any disconnect” between coaches, athletic staff and UT administration, he said “organizational structure is something (he) will be looking at.”

Winning, of course, would make everyone’s job easier, and Perrin said victories remain his top priority. His optimistic enthusiasm about the direction of the football and men’s basketball teams under Charlie Strong and Shaka Smart is palpable. So is his eagerness to learn everything he can about a job he said he’s willing to keep as long as Fenves asks him to stay.

What Perrin is realizing, he said, is this job suits him. After all, he’s never shied away from unfamiliarity. Five decades ago, when a rash of injuries hit UT’s linemen, Perrin went from scout-team fullback on Thursday to backup defensive end on Monday.

He adjusted and thrived. Now, he said he’s committed to doing the same.

“In some respects it was better for me to come in without time to reflect on it,” said Perrin, who received a phone call from Fenves on Labor Day and had the job two weeks later. “The train is moving. I had to jump on it.”

Mike Finger has worked for the Express-News since 1999, writing about the Texas Longhorns, the Big 12, the NBA and the NFL before becoming a sports columnist. He's covered 13 Spurs postseasons, six Final Fours and more than a dozen college bowl games.